Let's be clear. I wanted to build my site with Wordpress! When I was getting my degree, Wordpress was the king of content management, and anything else was just second rate. Yet here I am writing a blog post using Wix. How on earth did this happen? It all started with my wonderful wife Liz and my arrogant ego, a battle of Wordpress vs. Wix.
I knew that as a digital marketing proffesional I had to be right! My wife, as wonderful and kind as she is, simply could not know better than me about building a website, she just couldn't. These were the thoughts running through my head as my wife showed me the new blog she had been working on. The very blog known today as The Misfitfam. You see, my wife decided to use Wix, WIX! A website builder made for people who don't know how to make websites. A website builder that was know in the industry to lack SEO capabilities. A website builder that was not Wordpress! I knew I had to show her the light.
I explained to my dear, misguided wife that it was such a nice start, but there was a better system - Wordpress. It was a system that would allow us the ability to add whatever features we wanted with a nearly infinite amount of plugins. I had heard there was even drag and drop builders so that my wife could easily help build the website without my help, and SEO optimization was just one of any number of plugins away.
So, I went to work getting my hosting set up, downloading Wordpress, and getting started. I decided to have my wife try some drag and drop demos. She hated every last one of them - You guys... trying to find a drag and drop builder like Wix in Wordpress is not possible, at least not at the time of writing this post, but I digress. I KNEW Wordpress was better. My wife was just wrong and I was frustrated because she just couldn't understand how much more important the background SEO and plugins were (In reality I was being an arrogant jerk). So I "kindly" explained to her she was going to have to deal with it because we needed the background support.
Here is where reality finally started to set in for me. My wife wanted to have text over a photo. Yes you read that right, text over a photo - not photoshop text on a photo, but html text on an uploaded photo. I spent hours trying to get the theme we ( I ) choose to have text over a photo in a certain spot. IT WAS NOT HAPPENING. My wife then kindly and calmly did exactly, and I mean EXACTLY what she wanted on Wix in less than 1 minute. This floored me! Wix was so easy and so user-friendly, that it just destroyed the customization of Wordpress.
So I submitted and decided to try it myself. Wix was as easy, if not easier, than making a mockup design on photoshop, word, Indesign, or whatever program you are familiar with. The drag and drop builder that the people at Wix have created was far superior to anything I had ever seen in my life! When it comes to blogging, just about anything you want is in the Wix builder. You want a picture somewhere, done. You want a header on every page, just drag it on. You need a video - PLOP it on. no code, no barriers, no frustration, just drag it on.
But what about SEO? Wix knew they WERE lacking on SEO, but you can tell they have gone the extra mile to ensure SEO is top priority. Wix now has an SEO Wiz - their system goes through your site and analyzes what you need to do to improve your site. It literally gives you a check list and tells you how to fix it. Then it gives you a button to take you to the page to fix it. You fix it, publish, refresh and you checked off one item on your list. You can set key words that the Wix SEO Wiz will track and make sure you use properly. It is just too easy!
As you can plainly see, my wife won in the end. This is good for everyone, because the result is just so much better than anything I could have built in Wordpress! Don't get me wrong, Wix may not be for everyone, but I can say from experience that Wix is the superior content management system for bloggers - hands down!